September starts on Tuesday.
Which means somewhere in the next fortnight you will see a post telling you to audit your goals, reset your habits, and finish strong. And somewhere underneath that you will feel the small drop of having not done enough with the eight months already gone.
I want to offer you something different, and it will take less effort than any of that.
Hi lovely. You do not need a list.
Why the lists never work
Every so often the internet fills up with them. Write down what you want. Say it out loud. Feel it as though it has already happened.
I have never once told you to do that, and here is why.
Most of us can name what we want with terrible accuracy. You could say it in one sentence right now, without thinking about it, and you could have said the same sentence a year ago.
So if naming it was the hard part, it would already be done.
The list was never the problem. What we cannot do is believe we are allowed to have it, and no amount of writing it down more beautifully closes that gap.
I spent six years knowing exactly what I wanted to build. Not building it. I thought that was a time problem, then a money problem, then a not-the-right-moment problem. It was none of those. It was a worth problem wearing three different outfits.
Abundance does not fail at the wallet. It fails at the worth.
And the season is about to make this harder, not easier
This is the part nobody says.
The next four months are the most social of the year, and for a lot of women that is not a gift. Every invitation is a small negotiation. Every event is a decision about what to wear, who will be there, how long you have to stay and how much of yourself you have to perform.
The season that looks the most connected is often the one that costs the most.
So if you are already running on empty in August, a list of ten goals is not what you need. It is one more set of obligations arriving into a body that is already braced.
One thing, and then the dominoes
Here is what I do instead, and what I run in every room.
Pick one.
Not the lowest score on your wheel. Not the most urgent. The one that, if it changed, would make everything else easier.
You already know which one it is. Your body leans toward it while your head lists reasons it should be something else.
And this is the part people do not believe until it happens to them. When you move the right one, you do not have to push the others.
Sleep changes and suddenly you are not snapping at people you love.
You say one true thing and discover the next one is easier.
You let someone help you once and the whole shape of your week loosens.
They fall like dominoes, and they fall in an order you could not have planned, because you were never going to be able to move nine things at once. Nobody is. You were only ever going to move one, well.
How to pick it
Four questions. Answer them slowly, and pay attention to which one you go quiet at.
Where am I actually, rather than where I say I am when someone asks how I am?
What do I want that I have never said out loud?
Where do I feel that in my body, right now?
What is the smallest step I could take this week?
Most of us can answer the first and the last easily. The second and third are where it goes quiet, and quiet is the signal.
Whatever made you pause is the one.
What the next four months could be instead
Not a sprint. Not a reset. Not finishing strong.
One thing, chosen honestly, given four months.
That is enough time to change something properly, and short enough that you will not drift. And by Christmas you will not be looking back at a list with two things crossed off. You will be looking at one thing that actually moved, and a handful of others that moved because it did.
You do not need a list.
You need one honest answer, and the willingness to let it be enough.
If you would rather not do it on your own
Most of what I have written above, you can do by yourself. The four questions work at a kitchen table and they cost nothing.
But I will be honest about where people get stuck, because I got stuck there for six years. It is not choosing the one thing. It is staying with it once the novelty wears off, somewhere around week three, when the part of you that liked things exactly as they were starts making a very reasonable case for going back.
That is the part that is easier with someone in the room.
I work with women one to one, privately, over nine weeks. An opening session to find where you actually are, seven weeks in order because safety comes before wanting and wanting comes before worth, and a closing session to make sure it holds when I am no longer in the room.
Start in September and you are finished by mid November. Which means you go into the loudest part of the year already different, rather than bracing through it and promising yourself January.
It begins with a free twenty minute call, and that call is not a sales pitch. It is me asking you the four questions above and you finding out what your one thing actually is. Plenty of women have that call and go and do it on their own, and that is a good outcome.
If you want one, reply to this letter and tell me your one thing. I read every reply myself.
Freedom, abundance and worthiness. Your birthright.
One to one · aradhanaarya.com/sessions The podcast · aradhanaarya.com/podcast The app · In Her Rhythm © on the App Store, the first chapter is free Everything else · aradhanaarya.com
